some small mean thing
by Ash Light
Summary: "That was the moment, he would realise, when he'd stopped being a child. He'd become precisely what Gotham had made him to be." A young John Blake encounters Babs Gordon the evening after the Commissoner's funeral. Set in DK.


**title:** some small mean thing

**summary:** A young John Blake encounters an even younger Babs Gordon the evening after the Commissoner's funeral.

**disclaimer:** Characters sadly still not mine own.; with thanks to **CrazyAce'n'PokerFace **and whichever lovely anonymous reviewer asked for some John and Babs stuff, who both put the idea of this into my head.

**notes:** spoilers for DK and foreshadowing of DKR. Also am getting a Batman writing kick at the moment; any fic prompts hugely welcome!

-o-

He sees the girl in a dingy park on the wrong side of town, wearing a purple Kermit the Frog t-shirt and smashing a baseball bat into the fence until the metal chains sing.

The sun's setting now, and even to him the thought of lingering after dark sends chills down his spine. You just don't, it's not safe, it's drilled into you from birth that Gotham after dark takes no prisoners. Still, he hovers, just for a moment. He's used to some of the younger boys, little dribbling kids that are no more than babies, crawling into his bunk of a night, crying and sniffling; and even though he turned seventeen this spring he always lets them sit on his pillow and rub snot all over his t-shirt until they stop crying. The older boys laugh; he ignores them.

But she isn't an upset little kid. She's not crying. She's angry.

_(The first day he came to the centre he kicked a hole through the window. He'd screamed himself hoarse, he'd refused to eat, he'd punched an older kid who had made fun of him for being the son of a cop. When he'd finally fallen asleep, it had been with Father Reilly slowly stroking his hair, and tears that tasted bitter still staining his pillow.)_

He slowly moves across the park anyway, because he knows better than most what angry little kids can do to themselves, and anyway if she carries on like this someone's going to call the cops. So he runs, as fast as he can, and catches the bat with both hands just as she's about to take a terrific swing at a _NO LITTERING_ sign. When she spins round, fist clenched, he catches that too.

"Hey, you're alright," he says hastily, even though she's obviously _not_, "you're alright. It's ok." His voice is soft and slow, the way men talk to skittish horses. (_His dad had a horse once, when he was on mounted patrol, a great tall black thing he called Hercules_._ For a year at the centre he'd thought it might be kind of cool to find Hercules and run away to a ranch somewhere, ride far, far away from anywhere that looked like here._) She can only be five years younger than him. He bites his lip and awkwardly reaches out to pat her on the shoulder; and that's when he sees that she _has_ been crying, that great, dirty smudges track down her cheeks, that maybe the only reason her face is now dry is that there just aren't any more tears left in her body to cry. He gets that. He's been there too.

One big, shuddering sigh, and maybe those tears haven't quite dried up completely, maybe this is a kid who's not yet learnt to swallow up her tears quickly because no-one's going to come for you. Not all kids learn that lesson young, he thinks suddenly; and it hurts all the more the older you are when you finally do. "No," she says, forcing out the words, "it _isn't_."

He nods just waiting, because sooner or later everyone talks.

"They killed my dad," she replies thickly, her voice straining and wobbling. "They let him die."

_(He was eight when the men burst through the door, dark and masked and shouting things he didn't understand. The crackle of gunfire had reminded him of fireworks, but no child in Gotham is that innocent not to smell smoke and gunpowder and not think of death. He'd flung himself under the table even before his dad had shouted to him. The figures he saw through the tablecloth were blurred shadows, little more than puppets. Even when the final firework had gone off and the noise had stopped he'd stayed there, knees drawn to his chest, face pressed into the carpet, fingers in his ears. Two hours until the first police officer looked under the table; and by then it was too late.)_

"Oh," he mutters, because he's been at the centre for most of his miserable life now and he knows – God, more than most – how much this hurts, how much this tears into you, how there's nothing you can possibly do. Boys at the centre who've been there a couple of years trade stories like baseball cards, who's got the most thrilling tale to tell, and he's still pretty damn sure that this isn't the best way to heal. Besides, she's a girl, and if there's one thing Father Reilly's tried to drill into them it's that you treat girls well. His mind is blank. "I'm – that's terrible."

"He wasn't even supposed to be out there," she mumbled, hanging onto her baseball bat like a talisman, or a comfort blanket. "He was only - he was trying to stop the mayor getting hurt – and now he's dead, and the…and the mayor's still alive. It's not fair." A child's cry, plaintive and lost.

A memory, half-absorbed, flickers into his mind. "Your dad – he was that cop that got shot at the commissioner's funeral? Lieutenant Gordon?"

She nods.

He's not entirely sure what he's supposed to be seeing, but it sure as hell isn't Lieutenant Gordon's daughter. It's a small, skinny little kid still at that stage of being all elbows and knees and bitten fingernails. And scared. She's still scared.

"I'm sorry," he offers stupidly, because apologies are _stupid_ and he knows that better than anyone else that apologies mean nothing, they're little more than empty words. He's had _sorry_ flung at him since he was a child, in that same stupid way people wave toys at crying babies and howling dogs, when they can't be bothered to figure out what's really wrong and it's too much effort to really care.

_(The day his Aunt Marie came to the centre and told him how sorry she was, he flung a bowl at her. Sorry wasn't good enough, sorry was just a word, and sorry said that there was something she could have done, something she was accountable for. Sorry was an admission of guilt. She knew Dad had been in debt, she knew it and she hadn't done a thing. Sorry was meaningless, oh, but it hurt like hell all the same._

_She didn't come visiting again. Aunt Marie was the last family member he had left_._)_

He's said everything wrong, every last platitude, everything he knows won't make a difference. But maybe that's ok, because he knows that nothing he says will help, and saying something's better than saying nothing.

"It was the Joker," she mumbles finally, pulling herself to sit down on the tarmac, hugging the bat to her chest. Her voice still strains and chokes, as if her throat is about to cave in under the weight of her tears; and Christ, but no kid should have to sound that cold. "When I'm older, I – I'm going to kill him."

"If the Batman doesn't kill him first."

_(Flashing white teeth and a cheeky wink, glossy black lines of a car and some gorgeous six foot babe on his arm; but he saw the strain in those lips as they forced the smile, the flicker in those dark eyes. The agony of memory, looking at living breathing reminders of grief. He saw the mask, painted on like the face of a china doll, and he saw the cracks, and he saw the pain beneath. He _knew_ in that one instant, because he knew exactly what pain and anger drives you to, what kind of hell you have to go through to be pushed into the darkness and the shadows and make them your ally._)

The girl shrugs. It's an involuntary movement of the shoulders, nothing more, and she presses her mouth against the dirty jeans clothing her knees as a reply.

He waits, swivelling on the balls of his feet for five minutes before slowly sliding to sit next to her. The metal fence at his back bites into his skin. He wants to have forgotten what this is like, to be ignorant of how much every inch of yourself feels so tired and heavy and goddamn _alive_ at the same time, as if someone's struck fire all through your veins. You want to scream and punch and kick and make everyone in the world understand how much this is _wrong_, how the entire world no longer works properly because how could it when this has happened? And at the same time all you want to do is lay down your head, lay it down and never wake up again. He wishes all this was a distant memory, but it isn't. It's as clear as day.

He wishes like hell that it wasn't. But this is Gotham, and wishes crumble like dust here.

An intake of breath, cracked and breaking.

_(He learned not to cry after the first night. Father Reilly tried to comfort, and the helpers were kind, but they were never kind enough. And the older boys laughed, and some of them kicked at him in the night – 'shut that baby up for chrissakes, it's not as if the world's ended', and he's shocked to remember that those hard, jagged-edged voices came from boys that were barely ten – and by the first week he knew to swallow his tears. Anger was a current coin in there, it pushed you on and made you survive, but grief was foreign and worthless. Sometimes he woke to taste tears on his pillow, but they were always sour and tasted cold. He was never allowed to grieve._

_He thought he'd never rid himself of the feel of unshed tears still hoarded deep inside his chest, waiting for a chance to be released if they would all just leave him alone, until six months into his stay at the centre and a new boy was placed in his room, all blond curls and damp eyes. The tears rang out in the middle of the night, and his roommates groaned, and he turned over and pulled the pillow over his ears._

_That was the moment, he would realise, when he'd stopped being a child. He'd become precisely what Gotham had made him to be.)_

She doesn't know not to cry yet, and so cry she does, cries until she chokes, and tendrils of moisture snake down torn jeans. He should say something. But empty platitudes will always be empty. So he pulls an arm around her shoulders, this little stranger girl he doesn't even know, and draws her close, rests his chin against her scrub of mud-brown hair while she sobs.

In Gotham, reaching out is dangerous. You reach out and run the risk of being pulled down; reach out to touch someone else's grief and it spills onto your own skin like acid, raw and burning. Better keep back, and stay safe.

But that's a hell of a lonely way to live.

"Ssh, now," he whispers, and he can remember the faintest smell of jasmine and soft wool tickling against his skin, and a woman's voice rising and falling tenderly above him. A skinned knee, or maybe a bloody nose, that was all it took to set him crying in the days before his tears became worthless. He remembers the softness, and the whisper of words into his ear, but when he tries to summon up her face it disappears like mist. "Ssh. Just be easy. Just breathe. Just breathe for now." He rocks the small body gently, like you might do a baby.

He doesn't tell her not to cry.

When she finally withdraws from the little hollow of his arms and chest the girl's eyes are red-raw, and her lips are cracked. There's none of the shame in her eyes that all kids her age hold when they've been crying and they're dangerously close to thirteen and so very desperate to be taken seriously, but there will be. It makes him feel unexplainably sad that she'll learn to hoard her tears, even though he doesn't know her name.

"Better?" Another word that means nothing, _better_ is not the word, but there's nothing else he can say, there's no word in the English language that can ask if you've stored your hurt away for now, if you can breathe easily even when your heart is broken. And at least she nods.

He fumbles in his pockets helplessly, withdraws something small. It's stupid, a stupid little piece of gum in a packet that's lurid with colour and some gaping smiling face on the side; still, he hands it over. Her fingers still shake a little when they touch. It's nothing, less than nothing. But he wants to give something, anything, and this is all he has.

Still, she slips the sweet into her pocket. That's something.

"Do you want me to take you home?" It barely occurs to him that he doesn't know where that is.

The kid shakes her head, chews on her nail again. The first flicker of hard granite shield flickers in her eyes; she glances down, scuffs her shoes. "No. Um. Thanks."

"Anytime," he replies, and means it. He doesn't quite know why, but he means it.

He watches the girl walk away, trailing the baseball bat against the ground behind her, and feels impossibly angry. This is what they've dragged people like him and her down to; this is how far they've been reduced.

_(He forgets the girl within the day, within the time it takes for him to walk back and swap this tear-stained shirt for one that no longer tastes of grief and innocence lost. He pays her the regard of not a single thought until a month later, when Commissioner Gordon visits the centre on a good-will visit and his son's on his right-hand side and his daughter on the left, with a clean-fresh face and Animal on her t-shirt in place of Kermit. She hovers close to her father's elbow, as if she can't quite bare to let him slip from her vision, and the look in her eyes when he pauses to wink at her is so bright, he almost hates her, just for a second._

_Years later and they will become friends, years later and he will once more do anything not to see her cry, but for now her grief slips so easily from his memory because it is so utterly common; this is precisely what he will find he cannot forgive himself for.)_

-o-


End file.
